I recently had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go on safari in southern Africa. A safari guide and tracker introduced me to a delicious drink called the mochachocarula: coffee, hot cocoa powder, and the South African cream liqueur Amarula. While getting out muffin ingredients today, I remembered the drink and used it as inspiration. Read more …

Dilemma of the day: Amazon has the 6-inch HD fire on sale for $69 today. Do I buy it? I have a first generation Kindle Fire that’s pretty much only good for reading e-books and watching Netflix now. Browsing the web is impossible. But I’m also annoyed that Amazon doesn’t offer any support for the first-generation Fire anymore, so going … Read more

It is so freaking hot here. Is that how all my blog posts start lately? Until this heat wave passes, I will be living on blender ice cream – which isn’t a terrible diet since it’s fruit, fruit, more fruit, and a hint of stevia. And maybe a smidgen of vegetables thrown in. I snuck some tomatoes into this sorbet. You don’t have … Read more

The weather hasn’t cooled, so I’m still finding myself unable to eat all the bananas in the fruit bowl before they start turning too ripe to eat. (It doesn’t help that I consider any banana with no green on the skin “too ripe.”) Well, it’s time for more banana muffins! Just to keep some sort of variety in my life, I decided to make this … Read more

I’ve been continuing my experiments in vegan baking with coconut flour. This week, I decided to try a variation on the sweet potato muffins I posted a couple weeks ago. As with the vegan chocolate-orange muffins I made last week, psyllium is the not-so-secret ingredient for holding the muffins together and giving them a nice texture. If you like chai, you’ll love these … Read more

I’m still experimenting with coconut flour, but this week I wanted to try mixing it with another flour so I could use fewer wet ingredients and have a more traditional muffin texture. I loved how these turned out! Sweet potatoes and applesauce make them sweet with no added sugar. They’re moist and flavorful, and they keep well in the refrigerator if … Read more

I’ve got nothing against wheat, but it’s fun to mix things up a little. I found some coconut flour at Trader Joe’s and have been playing around with different recipes that use it. Coconut flour can’t be substituted one-to-one for wheat flour; it expands a lot when mixed with liquid, so you generally need to use less coconut flour than you … Read more